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Tuesday, September 16, 2014

5 Easy Ways to Optimize Your PPC Ads For Higher Ad Positions

If you are looking to find an easier way to list your ads on higher position in Adwords then these 5 tips can come to your rescue. I have implemented these tricks and found some great results both in terms of traffic and conversions. Hope, you can also benefit from these ad optimization tips. But, before I discuss those tips, let's learn a bit on the metric Ad Rank.

Ad Rank

It is the single metric that affects the position of your ads on Google search results. Ads having a higher ad rank are displayed at the top positions (above the fold) while ads having a low ad rank are displayed on the right hand side, on the 2nd page or below the organic search results. Hence, your ad rank is the factor which decides the position where your ad would get displayed.

Major Components of Ad Rank:

Ad rank is composed of 2 different factors which are your bid amount and the quality score. Formula for calculating Ad rank is given below:

Ad Rank = bid amount*quality score

Bid amount is the your max.CPC bid that you are willing to pay to Google for every click on your ad. Remember, max.CPC is not equal to your actual CPC.

Quality score is an individual score between 1-10 that Google provides for every keyword. The higher the quality score, the better are the chances of your ad rank.

Create and let Google choose these extensions based on the search query and location relevancy. Adding these site extensions will help to increase the overall Ad rank, thereby improving your ad position.

2- Choose "Optimize for clicks" under Ad Rotation Settings - Little Stuffs Can Go a Long Way In Optimizing Your Ads

Although, the default option in adwords is "optimize for clicks" but in case it's unchecked, I strongly recommend to use this option while promoting your PPC ads. Optimize for clicks will give preference to those ads that are expected to give more clicks thereby increasing your CTR and Ad rank.

If you are running campaigns that are based on conversions only then please ignore this option.

3- Create Very Specific Ad Groups and Prepare Highly Relevant Ads in Them - You Need to Invest Your Time Into These

You can create as many relevant ad groups and ad copies as you wish to because most of the advertisers do not reach the limit offered by Adwords. Don't believe me? Then, here are the limits:

How Many Campaigns, Ad Groups, Ads Can You create? (Campaign and ad group limits)

10,000 campaigns (includes active and paused campaigns)

20,000 ad groups per campaign

20,000 ad group targeting items per ad group (such as keywords, placements, and audience lists)

Ad limits

300 image/gallery ads

50 text and non-image/gallery ads per ad group

4 million active or paused ads per account

Targeting limits

5 million ad group targeting items per account (such as keywords, placements, and audience lists)

This one is really simple. Pay more and get top positions. For this, you need to check out the first page bid suggestions that Google provides you in the dashboard and start bidding in that range in order to get those top display positions.

You can find the first page bid suggestions in the keywords column in your ad group.

5- Optimize Your Landing Page, Yes..it Works!

I have seen many advertisers investing time and money in improving their ad campaigns but doing nothing when it comes to improve the landing page experience. Mostly, the new advertisers make this mistake. It is recommended to take a deep look at your landing page and the ad copy that you have created. Do they match or are they relevant enough to generate a high quality score? Your landing page must follow the below guidelines:

providing relevant, useful, and original content,

promoting transparency and fostering trustworthiness on your site (for example, by explaining your products or services before

adding proper CTA elements in order to generate conversions.

asking visitors to fill out forms sharing their own information),

making it easy for customers to navigate your site (including on mobile sites), and

encouraging customers to spend time on your site (for example, by making sure your page loads quickly so people who click your ad don’t give up and leave your site prematurely).